As I was by the two other vintage vibrators that I got to try out — the White Cross Electric Vibrator from 1917, which has a pronged aperture that makes it seem like the ancestor of Jimmyjane’s Form 2, and the Beautysafe Vibrator from the 1940s, which is reminiscent in look, feel and sound to a car waxer.

The U.S. release this week of “Hysteria,” a Maggie Gyllenhaal flick about a Victorian-era doctor who invents an electric massager and uses it to bring about “paroxysms” of relief in female patients with “hysteria,” seemed like a good excuse to get a private tour of the museum, which provided vibes that appear in the film, to learn about the history that’s left out of the movie’s fictionalized story line — and, of course, to try out antique pleasure devices while on the clock.

While the movie is set in the 19th century, doctors’ “manual manipulation” as a treatment for female hysteria goes back as far as the second century. “That took too long,” said Queen. “So doctors started training midwives to do it.” In Rachel P. Maines’ “The Technology of Orgasm: ‘Hysteria,’ the Vibrator, and Women’s Sexual Satisfaction,” she quotes a 1653 medical book that advises:

When these symptoms indicate, we think it necessary to ask a midwife to assist, so that she can massage the genitalia with one finger inside, using oil of lilies, musk root, crocus, or [something] similar. And in this way the afflicted woman can be aroused to the paroxysm.

Of course, this paroxysm was orgasm, but it was rarely acknowledged as such. Instead, it was said to be the exorcism of hysteria, a vague, catch-all diagnosis for female ailments thought to arise from a displaced uterus or, charmingly, a “wandering womb.” “Some of these women probably had PTSD, some of them were overworked, some of them had extreme stress in their lives, some of them almost certainly had sexual issues going on,” Queen explains. As Maines points out, “many of its classic symptoms are those of chronic arousal: Anxiety, sleeplessness, irritability, nervousness, erotic fantasy, sensations of heaviness in the abdomen, lower pelvic edema, and vaginal lubrication.” Married women were often given the prescription of sex with their husbands.

Eventually, doctors turned to technology to speed up the laborious treatment. “It started with hydraulic devices, water jets, but that really only worked well at spas,” said Queen. In 1869, an American physician patented the Manipulator, a padded table with a steam-powered vibrating mound that rested between the legs. A decade later, British physician Joseph Mortimer Granville – who’s at the center of “Hysteria,” albeit heavily fictionalized — patented a battery-operated vibrator for treatment of muscle pain. Interestingly, he was vehemently against the device being used for hysteria. He wrote, “I have avoided, and shall continue to avoid the treatment of women by percussion, simply because I do not wish to be hoodwinked, and help to mislead others, by the vagaries of the hysterical state.”

Ads selling vibrators as home appliances began to appear in women’s magazines, often showing “women in attractive nightclothes, using it on their chest,” Queen said. “You see facial massage shown from time to time.” These spots referred to them as “aids that every woman appreciates” and promised “all the pleasures of youth … will throb within you.” But when vibrators started showing up in stag films in the 1920s, the ads started to disappear, Queen says.

“Within the next 10 years or so, the doctors close up shop,” she said, perhaps in part because it became impossible to deny the sexual nature of these therapies. “In 1952, hysteria is taken out of medical books,” Queen explained. “The medical associations voted to say, ‘Nothing to see here, there’s really not a disease – no, no, no, we haven’t been treating this with clitoral and vulva massage.’”

Vibrators were still sold direct to consumers, but manufacturers made no mention of hysteria and instead “talked about body massage and vague promises of health, vigor and beauty.” The ’60s did away with the subtlety and euphemisms: Maines explains in her book, “When the vibrator reemerged during the 1960s, it was no longer a medical instrument; it had been democratized to consumers to such an extent that by the ’70s it was openly marketed as a sex aid.”

Asked whether doctors or patients saw the treatment as sexual, Queen said, “One of the schools of thought is, ‘How could they not?’ They’re touching the genitals, she starts to sweat and flail around and vocalize and her breathing changes and she gets a flush.” But others argue that “the definition of sex and sexual functioning for a woman was so associated with intercourse,” it was so male-centric, that this treatment, which was most often external, wasn’t seen as sexual. As Maines puts it, “Since no penetration was involved, believers in the hypothesis that only penetration was sexually gratifying to women could argue that nothing sexual could be occurring when their patients experienced the hysterical paroxysm during treatment.”

Paradoxically, Queen explains that hysteria was overtly linked to sex “in that they said women without husbands who were spinsters or widows or whose husbands had become incapacitated were more likely to suffer from it,” she said. “So there was a subtext of, ‘What this lady needs is a good fuck and, sadly, she can’t have one — but this is the next best thing.’” Maines attributes the demand for the treatment to two sources: “The proscription on female masturbation as unchaste and possibly unhealthful, and the failure of androcentrically defined sexuality to produce orgasm regularly in most women.”

We haven’t exactly escaped the expectation that women should be able to climax from penetration alone, but we’re slowly improving on that front — and the mainstreaming of vibrators has played a big part. That point was only driven home as I left the museum, which is located in the back of a Good Vibrations store, and walked past scores of sleek and sexy toys in every color of the rainbow, all unabashedly advertised as what they are: Tools for sexual pleasure.

Here’s how it works: Participants imprint their odor on cotton T-shirts and then bring them to the party. Upon registering and shelling out $30, they place their shirts in plastic bags with numbered Post-its – pink for women, blue for men. The bags are placed on a table in the party area in the courtyard out back, where guests can leisurely (or voraciously, as was sometimes the case) sniff shirts in between trips to the bar for an absinthe cocktail. When you find a shirt you like, you stand in line to get your picture taken with the prized numbered shirt. The photographs are projected on a slideshow throughout the night at the bar and on the big screen inside the movie theater.

When you spot the man or woman of your dreams holding up your  T-shirt and smiling for the camera, you can find them in the crowd and strike up a conversation.

Judith Prays, the 25-year-old filmmaker and rapper who launched the first pheromone party in New York City, conceived of the event as a new twist on speed dating, with pop science thrown in. The idea is that if a T-shirt’s odor arouses you, you’ll be sexually (and maybe emotionally?) compatible with its wearer. But they have to find you attractive based on looks — and come find you. And maybe when you meet them, you’ll find you were horribly mistaken; their shirt smelled heavenly, but in person they remind you of Strong Bad’s alter ego. It’s been described as half underwear fetish party, half “It’s Just Lunch!” I’d say it’s a little more like “The Lion King” meets “Elimidate.”

To my disappointment, only three men posed with my shirt. This, even in a party whose gender balance tipped copiously, wonderfully, toward male. The law of numbers says I should have had better luck with all those dudes milling around. But it was certainly validating to look at the slide show and see those guys holding up my T-shirt in a bag and smiling. For a moment, I thought, “Yes! It’s official! I have been deemed attractive to the opposite sex! Science has proven it.”

But I was not nearly as popular as No. 134.

“I want to find out who she is! I’ve seen at least six guys pose with her shirt!” I said to a few of the ladies around me as we took turns stuffing our noses into the Ziploc bags.

“She has got to be ovulating!” a black-haired woman declared.

When I asked the women what they found attractive about their desired shirts, they seemed frustrated that all of them just smelled like laundry. The black-haired woman noted, “But you can tell which guys cook. We nicknamed one of the bags Dirty Pasta. And this one smells like Splash Mountain!”

While most people waited in the increasingly long line for photos, clutching their favorite shirts to their chests, one man posed empty-handed and flashed a cocky smile to the camera.

“This doesn’t work for women towards men!” he fumed theatrically. “It’s men who are attracted to the pheromones of an ovulating female. Women are attracted to visuals, so I’m just posing by myself so all the girls can see how hot I am.”

“You are pretty hot,” I interjected. My flirt mechanism only has one setting: Forward.

“Don’t encourage me! Don’t call me hot if I’m bragging about it. What’s the matter with you?”

I went into this party wondering what kind of guys I’d be attracted to just on the basis of pheromone smell. Could I clear away all the flotsam in my heart – the fetishes for big noses and curly hair that I’ve had since high school, or my habit of falling for cocky artists and writers? What if I could reset and recalibrate my attraction patterns and strip them down to pure physical science? It would be like a blind taste test for coffee. Without being preconditioned for brand recognition, I’d be able to go only on what my senses were telling me. Maybe I’d find that my animal instincts really wanted a broomstick-thin MGMT fan with a pedo mustache. Maybe all this time my heart’s been searching for a  Norwegian, a massive wall of a man, instead of the compact, kind-eyed Jewish boys I always (always!) fall in love with.

But as I jostled through the pack of absinthe-soaked singles and made my way, time and again, to the shirt-sniffing table, it became hard to disentangle the physical from the mental and emotional. I didn’t know what I was looking for, err, smelling for, as I opened random bags taped with blue numbered Post-it notes. Some bags smelled clean and almost floral. Others smelled like plastic. Others, like cotton. The aromas ranged from pungent to sweet, sweaty to metallic to chemical, spicy to yeasty. But none of my judgments on which bags smelled pleasant were based on smell alone. Did I like this shirt because its delicate pheromones were sending signals to my adrenal system? Or was it the sweet scent of Downy April Fresh that reminded me of the lazy Saturday mornings of my childhood? Was my norepinephrine working the magic here, or was it just my limbic-based memory? Cartesian duality, don’t fail me now! And then there was the bag whose scent gave me a twinge of nostalgia for an old flame. Should I pick it up because I’d been attracted to him? Or should I put it down because it didn’t work out? And was I actually getting excited about specific pheromones here, or only the generic and intoxicating odor of organic cotton mingling with male sweat, which I’d been physically primed and socially conditioned to feel thrilled by ever since girlhood?

I spotted a cute guy who had posed with my shirt and tapped him on the shoulder. He was skinny and wore a flannel shirt. “Hi,” I said. “I saw you holding my shirt. I’m Lauren. I’m No. 630.”

“Oh wow, you’re No. 630? You were a hit with my whole group of friends. Yeah, everyone at our table liked you. Hey, John!” he said, calling his friend over. “This is No. 630.”

“Hi, I’m Lauren,” I said, offering my hand.

“You’re No. 630?! Oh cool!”

I felt like a celebrity. I asked the guys what it was exactly that had made my shirt a such a hit. Out of writer’s curiosity of course.

“It smelled like girl,” they chorused.

“Well,” elaborated my flannel suitor, “It smelled like waking up in the morning, you know, comfortable, but excited too … and roses.”

“So … what does it mean that you liked my shirt? Like, when you sniff these shirts, what are you looking for? And what do you conclude when you find one that you like?”

“Well, it means, on some level, I want to have sex with you.”

Best pickup line ever? Or bestest pickup line ever?

“So here’s a question for you,” he continued. “Why did you come over to me when you saw me holding your shirt?”

“Oh. Well, I thought you were cute.”

The guy explained that he was a scientist who studied primates, so he knew what was behind this whole pheromone business.

“It’s all about health and immunity,” he explained. “Your pheromones are attracted to mine because we have compatible immunities. For instance, maybe my ancestors were immune to the black plague. And yours were immune to malaria.”

“So our children will be super-immune!” Yes. Let’s reproduce right now and travel to India and medieval Europe all we want!

“I’m going to do an experiment with you,” he said. He then picked out three shirts from the table, one of which was his, and invited me to smell all three and tell him which one I liked the best. If I really did find him attractive, I would easily pick his shirt out of the lineup. I sat on a bench beneath the twinkly lights and sniffed each bag. One smelled like nothing. One smelled a little medicinal. “Ugh, this one is rank,” I said, sniffing the third bag. Bad move. It was his. I failed the shell game. I was Goldilocks in reverse. The third shirt was just ripe.

To be fair, the guy hadn’t followed the rules at all. Having just learned about the party an hour before it started, he’d flipped a U-turn on Fairfax, whipped off his undershirt, and stuffed it in a bag upon arriving at the Silent Movie Theatre. It didn’t smell like three nights of faint, showered, body odor. It smelled like a locker room.

He tried to think of an explanation for why I would find his face attractive but not his sweaty T-shirt. “Maybe you’re out of sync with your pheromones,” he offered.

I wasn’t banking on finding true love at the pheromone party, even though people reportedly hooked up in droves and began long-term relationships at the inaugural pheromone party in New York City. But I was intrigued by the idea that we can reduce our desires to their basest level. Many of us have heard of the experiment where women are asked to smell a lineup of white cotton shirts, and then it turns out that the shirts they found the most pleasing belonged to the men they found the most handsome, with the most symmetrical faces. Maybe women are attracted to strong jawlines and symmetrical faces because we’re still susceptible to all the evolutionary cues that tell us, “I will father strong, resilient babies with you, and then I will help you take care of them.” Maybe men are attracted to the scent of a woman with robust ovaries who will produce dozens of offspring that carry their genetic code. Maybe on some level, we women are just acting in an updated play that our cavewomen ancestors performed. We might think we want a funny, sensitive guy who likes Lisa Cholodenko movies, cooks Thai food and reads the Rumpus, but what we really want is nothing more than a muscular display of an excellent Y chromosome.

This scenario could certainly make the dating slog easier – just marry whoever smells the best! But it leaves entire swaths of humanity out of the equation. It erases all sorts of sexual orientations, fetishes, non-normalized gender identities, disabilities, races, and histories both personal and cultural. Aside from the fact that most of what we’ve been taught about “how we were in caveman times” is based on racialized and gendered mythology, the fact is, we are not just cellphone-toting incarnations of our ape ancestors. We aren’t born with preloaded instincts to hunt, gather and sleep together exactly as we did in the Stone Age. We are born with brains primed to learn and adapt to social patterns with lightning speed. Which means that what we find attractive, and how we categorize our objects of desire, are not based on a template unaltered from our paleolithic past, but on what we absorb, engage with, and construct, and what is constructed for us. This is not to say that our drives are purely cultural – we have hormones too. But culture is not like clothing. You can’t strip it off to reveal the “true” drives underneath.

Of course, heteronormative evolutionary psych propaganda is not exactly what the pheromone party people have in mind. Participants are, after all, encouraged to sniff pink bags and blue bags – “It’s OK to experiment!” said the chalkboard above the T-shirt table. It certainly would have been edgier and made for a more transgressive evening if the bags weren’t gender-coded at all. Of course, no rule said you could flirt only with those who posed with your shirt-sniffed armpits, before running off into the biological determinist sunset to raise strapping caveman babies and hunt mastodon.

And at the end of the day, it was a courtyard full of single people. The air was buzzing with puckish promise, setup or no setup. Of course, introducing yourself as the mystery girl from Bag No. 630 makes for a great icebreaker. But I also managed to have some engaging conversations with a fellow East Coast transplant while waiting at the bar. We traded teenage nostalgia stories about the hippie crystal thrift stores in Newark, Del. I also met writers, filmmakers and the guy wearing a fez. I’d chalk this up to my ineffable charm and gregariousness, but when I spotted a gentleman I found particularly handsome (the arrogant theatrical one from earlier), my smooth introduction was, “Hi!” as he rushed by me with a clear look of disinterest. Sigh. Maybe I should have worn perfume.

I spoke with them both by phone about sex-positive parenting, where they draw the “TMI” line with each other, and their tips for making “the sex talk” less awkward.

Aretha, this might be an annoying question, because I’m sure you’ve gotten it for most of your life, but: What’s it like having a “sexpert” for a mom?

Aretha: I’ve been getting this question since second grade. Kids brought it up in the line at the cafeteria. I remember being way more defensive about it then, because just saying the word “sex,” it was like a four-letter word.

But now? It’s the same answer I always give, which is that it was pretty cool. I was the envy of all of my friends throughout puberty and high school. It’s interesting because now that I’m college-aged, I can see differences in how kids were brought up and, you know, I can see how my upbringing has affected me.

Did you have friends in high school who desperately wanted to come over and ask your mom for advice?

Aretha: I started community college when I was 13, so I had college friends who were in their 20s and late teens, and they felt really comfortable talking to my mom. Sometimes I got really jealous because they’d want to have alone time with her to talk about their relationship problems. With my high school friends, they felt too shy and inhibited. It was more that they’d come to me with a crisis and then I’d bring it to my mom.

Were you ever uncomfortable talking to your mom about sex when you were younger?

Aretha: No. Never. From age zero to now, I don’t think it’s ever been uncomfortable.

Susie: There’s an important distinction between “Do you feel comfortable talking about your personal sex life with your parents?” and “Do you feel comfortable talking about other people’s sex lives and sex in general, sex in the news and ‘what if’ sex, where you say, ‘I have a friend …’” All of that we’re very comfortable with. I think anybody would be shy when you feel like you need a little distance between you and your parents.

Sometimes I talk to kids and they tell me, “I have the opposite problem. My parents confide to me as if I was their little friend.” For me, that isn’t a healthy, sex-positive parental frame any more than being uptight and refusing to let a single word be said about it. Somehow, it’s the opposite but the same thing. A good parent says, “You can talk to me about anything and it can be in general terms. If you’ve got a physical problem and you’re uncomfortable talking, can I help get you to a clinic or a doctor that you would feel comfortable talking to?” Don’t get all hurt that they don’t want to tell you, just help them find someone that they can talk to instead of getting all sulky about it and saying, “You have to tell me everything or else I won’t help you!”

Aretha: I think we’ve always been sensitive about talking about each other’s sex lives. Except for when it comes to things that happened earlier in her life. I remember being really curious about how my mom lost her virginity. I could hear that story a million times.

Susie: There’s so many different levels of what it’s like to have conversations about sex, and because so many families don’t discuss it at all, they think that once you open the door it’s somehow like there’s no privacy, there’s no boundaries, there’s no self-respecting way to talk about anything. But I knew that wasn’t the case, even from my own growing up. My mom told me about getting her period, which I thought was fascinating, because she told me about the nuns stuffing a rag down her pants and they wouldn’t tell her what was happening. Her moral was, “I’m telling you this because you’ll never have to go through that, because I’m going to tell you the scientific reason for menstruating.”

My dad was the same. He would say, “I was so shy, I never kissed anyone until I kissed your mom, and I was in college,” but there were other things he wouldn’t have expressed to me — and of course not. It just starts to feel creepy, and I guess not everyone’s creep line is in the same place.

It’s just knowing that you can hold your privacy and yet you can share things that are part of a valuable conversation. Part of what I liked so much about writing the Jezebel column, and writing this book, was that I could hear Aretha’s reactions to things and it made me realize how strongly she felt about certain topics. I wasn’t going to just say to her, “So, Aretha, what do you feel about oral sex personally?” No way, I would have been too embarrassed and she would have been like, “Are you out of your mind?” When I heard her sticking up for other girls getting satisfied in bed and not just lying there and crying afterward …

Aretha: Why would I want them to do that? That makes no sense!

Susie: Well, you say that, but I know plenty of women who would say, “What do you expect, you shouldn’t be so romantic or you should try harder.” There are some really negative, shaming answers. The fact that you were such a good advocate, it just made me so happy inside. It wasn’t like I had dragged you over to a desk every day and said, “Now, Aretha, how do you spell ‘orgasm’?”

Susie, what sort of parental anxieties did you have about sex?

Susie: Well, I still have them in the sense — this is more dating and relationships — when she meets someone new, I wonder if I’ll like her boyfriend. If I don’t think they did something right or they hurt her feelings, there’s part of me that wants to run over and slap them — even though I’m supposed to just listen and be cool because they’re probably going to make up in 10 minutes and then I’ll look ridiculous.

Aretha: From my side, I see my mom worrying, like, “I want Aretha to feel like she can ask for what she wants with anyone, because not everyone’s had the same upbringing she’s had, so they might not know that everything’s supposed to be egalitarian.”

Susie: Yeah, but you haven’t had any really terrible sweethearts. You’ve had pretty open-minded people in your life so far.

Aretha: Well, there might be ones that maybe you don’t know about …

Susie: OK, now it all comes out! [Laughs] When you first asked that question, Tracy, I wondered what you meant, if it was, “Were you worried that Aretha would get pregnant too young?”

Well, here’s another question: What do you think most parents are afraid of when it comes to sex and their kids — is it the fear of them getting pregnant, of them having sex too soon?

Susie: I think the fear of having sex too soon is this big, tender topic that covers a lot of things. On the surface, they would say, “An early pregnancy or some sort of STD could be tragic and wipe my kid’s life out.” But if you scratch at that a little bit, lots of times it’s because the parent identifies with the kids and is having memories about regrets, about things they did or didn’t do when they were teenagers. So their child’s coming of age is like their chance of doing it over again.

As much as it’s true that I could just jump in there and completely micromanage every detail for Aretha, it is so important not to do that, to be a good listener and let them know that you hear them, to respond if they want your help but to mostly just be really solid and say, “I’m there for you.” You have to take every lesson you ever learned from a good therapist and bring it to bear and give them the space to figure it out on their own — not to be neglectful but not to be a busybody either. It’s such a hard line to walk, I’m not trying to make it sound easy.

Why is it so hard for most parents and kids to talk about sex with each other? We make such a big deal about the Sex Talk, as though it’s one talk that happens, ever, between parents and their kids. Why is that?

Aretha: Where to even start?

Susie: There’s so many fingers you want to point. For me, it had a lot to do with being raised in a religion that was very condemning of sexuality outside of procreation and women’s subjugation.

That sure covers a lot territory. So how can you make talking about sex with your kids, or with your parents, less awkward?

Susie: I got some of my first lessons of how to handle this when I worked in a vibrator store and someone would say, “How do I raise this with my husband?” or “How do I raise this with my wife?” I got really good at answering this: First of all, if talking is the part that freaks you out, buy a book and leave it in the bathroom or on the coffee table.

Aretha: I think you have to be careful with that, though! So many people complain, “My parents left a book under my bed about our changing bodies and they never said word one, they just expected me to find the book and come to them with questions later.” And guess what, they never came to them with any questions because they figured, “My parents are too shy to talk to me about it so I shouldn’t talk to them.” Not to, like, totally slam your suggestion, mom.

Susie: But they did something! People are always asking me, “Are there any particular books I should have in my house for sex education?” and I say, “You know what? If you have books at all, that’s great.” Books! Newspapers! Talk about what you’re reading on the Web! Sex will inevitably come up if you’re talking about it like you’d talk about anything else — in politics, in science, in arts. It’s not a ghettoized topic.

Here’s another thing: I call it “the cool aunt theory.” You realize that you, the parent, are too upset and uptight about sex to say anything, but your sister or friend or ex or someone you know very well has a sense of humor and has a good head on their shoulders and you go to them and ask, “Could you do this?” Or here’s another thing, when your kid raises an uncomfortable question, to just say, “You know, that is a really good question and I’m not sure I know the answer.” You’ve given yourself some time, but you’ve been friendly about it and then you can decide if you bring in somebody in the family or you get a book or find a documentary on PBS. The point is you don’t just freeze like a deer in the headlights and go, “Ahh!”

You can use that for a million things. People act like this is the only difficult topic — try talking about death in the family or money issues. There are so many things where people feel tense and if you can find some calming, loving ways to handle touchy questions in one area, you can pretty much apply it to everything.

Aretha: And definitely you can never start too early. Kids are talking about sex in one way or another starting in kindergarten.

Generationally, how were your youthful sexual experiences different?

Aretha: My mom was in high school in the ’70s — you know, a lot of free love everywhere. Seriously, when I was in high school and I liked two boys at the same time, my mom would suggest that we have an open relationship, like it was the most normal thing in the world! And she was like, “Why are you so possessive of each other? You’re so young, you don’t know who you are yet, so just experiment! They can’t even say they’re straight yet.” I just remember feeling like, “She does not understand. It is so different now.”

There’s also way, way more virgins and people who are waiting to have any sexual experiences. In some ways, I think kids know more, but they also know less, practically speaking.

Susie: I knew I was being kind of snotty when I was saying, “Why not have an open relationship?” but I just had to make my little feminist point.

Aretha: Well, you said it a lot.

Susie: I have a lot of feminist points to make, I guess. You know, all these people that are trying to live out the romance bible are going to grow up and realize that life is more complicated, and why not be exposed to reality? People either are having open relationships or they’re cheating, and here are these people in ninth grade acting like they’ve got to take their vows and it’s just so silly!

I not only came of age in the ’70s, I was also in a major urban high school and I was in a feminist consciousness-raising group, I was involved in an underground commie anarchist newspaper. So it’s like, yes, I was in an extremely different scene, but the tenderness, the inexperience, the shyness and all the drama that happened every day, that was the same.

Did you notice any themes in the questions that you got for the column?

Aretha: Um, that they have horrible boyfriends and that they should dump them?

Susie: The funniest line was people would always say, “Our sex life is awesome, but …” and then they would tell me this problem that would negate it being “awesome.” This is from my crabby old feminist dyke warrior lady position, but I was constantly saying, “Why would you give a fuck what he thinks?” Or I’d think, “What you need is a nice, big lesbian experience.” I would think that the lesbian cure, if you were in a lesbian milieu, you wouldn’t be so second-guessing yourself and your femaleness all the time, but I realized that’s a generation gap too. I get some questions from young lesbians and some of them are just as fragile as any straight girl. I realized it’s more my feminist point of view rather than gay or straight.

What was your favorite question that you got for the column?

Aretha: This wasn’t my favorite question, it was what happened afterward: Someone sent us a picture of her hand and an engagement ring on it and I was like, “Yes! It worked out!” I liked the throw-up column, the girl who throws up every time her boyfriend comes in her mouth. I liked the boyfriend who asked how he could ask his girlfriend to shave her pubic hair, politely.

Susie: Aretha’s answer to that is, “There is no polite way!”

Aretha: I stand by that.

Susie: My favorite was we answered a question from a girl who was given a Paxil prescription after a five-minute intake and it had a terrible impact on her libido. We wrote her a super-sympathetic, supportive thing that basically said, “Go see someone who will pay attention to you.” We thought it was a great answer, but it got a lot of pushback from people who are using and approve of the SSRI’s in their life. The Paxil cheerleaders were enraged!

But the girl who wrote the question really, really liked our answer and felt encouraged. It felt good, it makes you feel great when you’re a total stranger and you’re able to make a positive difference in someone’s life or their health. That’s what I like about my job in general, and it was even more poignant to do it with Aretha. It was like suddenly having a million daughters instead of just one.

Speaking of, breast implants are more popular than ever: It’s the most common form of plastic surgery, above even nose jobs and liposuction. Even cosmetic enhancement notwithstanding, breasts are bigger than ever, and girls are getting them at increasingly younger ages. These recent dramatic changes are the heft of Williams’ book, although she also covers evolutionary basics, like why we have them, what they’re made of and how they work. It’s an interesting and engaging read peppered with factoids the kid from “Jerry Maguire” would no doubt appreciate (e.g., “the average breast weighs just over a pound”). Occasionally, it veers into technical territory that will put some readers to sleep, but overall it’s a much-needed look at why breasts matter more than we realize, even in our boob-obsessed society.

I spoke with Williams by phone about the myth of the perfect pair, growing bra sizes and toxic breast milk.

One of the trickiest questions posed by the book is the simple one of why breasts exist. After all of your research, where do you stand on that question?

It’s a pretty contentious debate and surprisingly so. I think both sides have some biases and also some logic behind them, but where I see it coming down is between natural selection — like, “Are these breasts for women and their babies?” — or sexual selection, as in, “Are they signals for men?” Ultimately, I really fall down on “Let’s look at how breasts work and what they’re made out of.”

So, for me, it made sense that these are naturally selected organs, which is true for mammary glands in every other mammal that we know of. There are no other mammals in which breasts are sexually selected. It just makes sense that in our deep evolutionary past we really needed those extra few percentages of fat, and breasts gave us a place to put that, and really helped gestate and lactate the human infant, which has these unique fat requirements. The mammary gland in the breast in humans is filled with estrogen receptors and those actually make fat. There’s this relationship between fat and estrogen, and where there’s estrogen, that’s going to tell cells to start storing fat, and as there’s more fat, that’s going to help make more estrogen.

So it’s possible that breasts are the result of natural selection but they also play their part in sexual selection?

Yeah, absolutely. There’s no doubt at all that a lot of men are really, really attracted to breasts! But it could be that that attraction came later or was secondary, and it’s never really been satisfactorily proven that all men in all cultures across all times are obsessed with breasts.

It so totally goes against common wisdom, but it’s common wisdom that hasn’t been proven?

It hasn’t been proven. In fact we have such strong cultural biases about breasts that it’s easy to see how some of these anthropologists may just be projecting their own beliefs back into evolutionary times, and that’s just a classic no-no. We don’t really have fossil evidence of when breasts evolved because you can’t dig up a fossil of an early human and know what her cup size was.

So, there’s no “perfect” breast in terms of male sexual preference?

Well, certainly Hollywood and plastic surgeons would like us to believe that there’s a universally preferred large breast, but the evidence just doesn’t really bear that out. There are a lot of men out there who like small- or medium-size breasts, and there are some men out there who don’t seem particularly interested in breasts. In fact, breasts are so varied in humans that if there really was this evolutionary or even sexually selected preference for large breasts, you’d think we’d see a lot more of them. Women with small breasts are just as capable of nursing infants and that’s why those traits persisted.

Speaking of plastic surgeons: You actually had one evaluate your own breasts for the book. What was that like?

It was really bizarre and funny. I always thought my breasts were sort of perfectly fine. I kind of went in there thinking, “Oh, he’s gonna tell me that, ‘Congratulations, your breasts are fine,’ because he’s this great judge of breasts and presumably he’s seen all these incredible deformities.” I walk in there and take off my robe and he squeezes me and squishes me and pulls out a measuring tape and gives his final pronouncement, “Well, let me just say you would be a perfect candidate for augmentation.” I had to just crack up. So much of that industry is about the soft sell — they’re just so good at making women think that they’re not good enough the way they are.

When did breast implant mania really begin?

The first silicon breast implant was performed in 1962, so 50 years ago. It was up and running pretty quickly after that. It was particularly popular among women who made their living onstage — the go-go dancers and the burlesque dancers and the topless dancers and then Hollywood. Eventually it leaked into the broader culture, and certainly by the ’70s and ’80s women were going for this. Then there was the implant scare of the ’90s, in which a lot of women had problems with their implants, and the FDA actually banned them for 14 years. But now they’re back; they’ve never really been proven to be linked to disease or cancer. In fact, more women are getting implants now than ever before — over 300,000 a year.

And breasts are getting bigger in general, not simply because of plastic surgery. What’s going on there?

The main factor there is, of course, the American diet. Women’s bodies are getting bigger and their breasts are getting bigger along with it. Men are getting bigger, too! In fact, men are getting breasts more often and male breast reduction surgery is becoming more and more popular.

There also may be other factors at play that have to do with hormones in food and birth control pills and in hormone replacement therapy, and of course we have all these estrogenic chemicals in our environment. All of those things appear to be interacting with our breasts on some level.

Somewhat related, why are girls experiencing puberty and getting breasts earlier and earlier?

I would say similar reasons. We don’t know for sure, but it appears that diet is the major factor there. Girls are sort of undergoing what’s sometimes called over-nutrition. A third of kids now are overweight or obese. You’re also seeing skinny girls getting breasts earlier, so the obesity theory does not seem to fully explain the phenomenon. There are researchers out there that have tried to examine the role of chemicals and pharmaceuticals, but the jury is still out.

Turning to the function of breasts for feeding infants, one of the purposes of breasts that’s not actually up for debate: How and why did lactation evolve?

Lactation evolved 200 million years ago, even before there were mammals as such. It evolved in the precursor to mammals, probably not as a food but as an anti-infection substance. It helped fight pathogens and helped the immune system, and many of those qualities have been conserved. Breast milk today is not just filled with nutritional substances but it’s filled with these immune system-boosting substances that scientists are just beginning to understand. There are proteins and enzymes and complex sugars that are really quite amazing at inhibiting parasites and killing E.coli on contact. It also seems to be filled with bacteria too, and so it may be inoculating the infant’s immune system or educating it as to which bacteria are good and which are bad.

It’s an amazing, complex, highly evolved substance. It’s the only food on the planet that’s really meant to be eaten by humans.

It seems that nearly everything breast-related is controversial and lactation is no exception. What’s your position on the breast-is-best debate?

Really, throughout human history there have been women who just didn’t want to breast-feed, and I totally get it. Breast-feeding can be really hard. One of the earliest professions was not prostitution but actually being a wet nurse.

Certainly in Western societies it’s really safe to be raised on formula. Where you see the more dramatic benefits from breast milk are with preemies; they do much, much better. When you go to developing countries where the water isn’t safe, formula isn’t a great option, and you can really use these extra immune-boosting benefits because of these pathogen rich environments. It makes sense from a public health standpoint to really advocate breast milk in developing countries. In our country, what would be great is to really support women who want to breast-feed through better workplace policies.

We see negative entities in breast milk as well. The weight of the book is devoted to ways that our breasts are, as you write, “the catchment for our environmental trespasses.” Why are we seeing toxins show up in breasts and breast milk, of all places?

A lot of these substances, if they exist in the breast they also exist in the blood and in a lot of cells in our body. But many of them are attracted to fat and our breasts are among the fattiest organs we have next to our brains. So breasts are these soft sponges and they soak up a lot of things in our environment. They’re incredibly good at converting these substances into breast milk. It’s a little creepy.

What about the transmission to nursing babies?

It appears that the benefits of breast milk still by far outweigh the risks, and even though we have these unnatural substances in our breast milk it still exists for the most part in small quantities. Nonetheless, we don’t really understand what the health effects of this are. It seems wise to look harder at these chemicals. If they’re not proven safe, maybe we should try to use something else. It would be great to provide greater incentives for manufacturers to put safer chemicals on the marketplace.

I’m so curious what you think of sexualized attempts at raising awareness about breast cancer — ads like the “Save the Boobs” PSA, which pictured a pair of bouncing bikini-clad breasts, and the explosion of “I (heart) boobies” bracelets.

I guess the sexualization of breasts is a reality and we’re not going to change that any time soon. I did like that those ads tried to reach a younger audience, so there you have it. Breasts are filled with contradictions and conflicting messages, but the more we can understand their complexity and appreciate that complexity, the healthier we’ll be down the road.

This week saw the passage of a Tennessee bill that has the usual aim of abstinence initiatives — to “exclusively and emphatically” promote abstinence until marriage. But the bill ultimately goes above and beyond the usual. It allows parents to seek damages in court if a teacher “promotes gateway sexual activity” to their child. It’s unclear what exactly “gateway sexual activity” is because the measure defines it vaguely as “sexual contact encouraging an individual to engage in a non-abstinent behavior.” Critics of the bill have suggested that this could include everything from hand holding to french kissing. The bill also proscribes “implicitly” promoting or “condoning” gateway sexual activity (the latter could mean simply turning a blind eye to it, hence the example above).

The potential legal implications here are what’s most important, but understanding the philosophy behind this view of “gateway” sexual activity is crucial, too. The thinking here is transparent: Premarital or extramarital sex, even physical affection, is like a drug — all-consuming, addictive and life-destroying. Sen. Margaret Dayton, a co-sponsor of the bill, actually said, as the Salt Lake Tribune paraphrased, “Teaching children about contraception is comparable to telling kids not to do drugs, then showing them how to ‘mainline’ heroin.” Here we have that fundamental fear of sex, of the power it holds over us, and of the possibility of losing ourselves (or our kids) to it.

Shortly before the “gateway” bill, Tennessee lawmakers advanced Senate Bill 49, dubbed the “Don’t Say Gay Bill,” which stipulated that “no public elementary or middle school shall provide any instruction or material that discusses sexual orientation other than heterosexuality.” The measure managed to get Senate approval but, after intense public and legislative outcry, it was yanked by one of its sponsors before it faced a final vote in the House. An abstinence bill in Utah, which breezed through the state legislature but was ultimately vetoed last month by the governor, similarly banned any discussion of the gays. Wisconsin’s abstinence bill doesn’t prohibit the mention of homosexuality, but it does overwrite a current law requiring that teachers “use instructional methods and materials that do not promote bias against pupils of any race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, or ethnic or cultural background.”

Here we have that classic conservative view of homosexuality as a corruptive idea rather than an inherent identity; as a social virus — one that can be inoculated against through silence (or, as some of us might prefer to call it, censorship) — rather than an inborn reality. (What always strikes me about this attitude is that it seems implicitly to hold that gay sex is so awesome that just hearing about it will make folks want to try it; otherwise, it wouldn’t pose such a threat, now, would it?) It also gets at that right-wing sore spot: The possibility of sex for love or pleasure, rather than procreation.

Of course, homosexuality is far from the only thing that treads in this forbidden territory. The Utah bill forbids any “human sexuality instruction” from covering contraception, premarital sex or “the intricacies of intercourse, sexual stimulation, or erotic behavior.” (The ultimate effect of the extreme restrictions is a ban on human sexuality classes. Either teach anti-gay, anti-contraception, abstinence-only “human sexuality,” or teach nothing at all.) Contraception helps reduce the negative consequences for engaging in pleasure- or love-based premarital sex — and abstinence-only advocates desperately want to keep the sexual stakes high. (For the same reason we see attempts to restrict access to contraception and HPV vaccines.)

Speaking of negative consequences, the Utah and Wisconsin bills share a focus on STIs and unwanted pregnancy as the inevitable result of premarital sex. The Utah measure requires that human sexuality classes underscore “the importance of abstinence from all sexual activity before marriage and fidelity after marriage as the only sure methods for preventing certain communicable diseases.” The Wisconsin initiative mandates that human sexuality classes “promote abstinence and marriage over contraception” and “emphasize that abstinence is the only reliable way to prevent pregnancy and avoid sexually transmitted infections” (which is patently false).

Even the acknowledgement of hormonal changes and natural urges is dangerous. Earlier this month, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker signed into law a bill that removed not only contraceptives but also puberty — puberty! — from the list of required topics in sex-ed classes. The concept of puberty itself makes natural what abstinence-only advocates desperately want to seem unnatural.

More relatable is the concern guiding the push for greater parental power in some of these bills. The Utah measure requires that guardians make up the majority of review committees for human sexuality curricula and that they be allowed to participate in the development of abstinence-only classes. This year, Arizona introduced a bill that requires schools to obtain written permission from parents in order to teach any form of sex ed and secures parents’ rights to opt out on behalf of their kids. Adults are desperate enough to control sex in their own lives — from the content of their, or their spouse’s, fantasies to the threat of infidelity. And, of course, there’s that universal desire to protect our kids from the dangers of the world (and you don’t have to be a right-winger to believe that sex can be dangerous).

Together, these recent bills make clear several fundamental fears — of the power of sex, of losing control of our kids and of the allure of non-procreative sex without consequences. Aside from their magnitude, those worries aren’t a uniquely right-wing phenomena. What is uniquely right-wing is taking such extreme attempts to legislate against those fears.